keep on running

A couple of follow-up items to the last post, which was getting a bit long anyway:

My general running career outside of parkrunning comprises a very small number of other events, spread over a large number of years. Most significantly, I ran two half-marathons in the space of about six months back in 2004 and 2005. As always, for someone who doesn't just naturally love running, as some maniacs appear to do, the interesting question here is one of motivation, and I think a couple of friends hatched the idea and I signed up in a brief spasm of enthusiasm, far enough away from the actual date that it didn't quite seem real. 

Of course it does eventually start to seem real, and among some of the endless slogging around the Downs on training runs I did compete in a couple of 10-kilometre races as a warm up: the Nailsea 10K which I remember being intermittently hilly but which I smashed round in 51:38, and the Frampton Cotterell 10K which I recall finding much more difficult despite it being flatter and which I ran in a slower (though still perfectly respectable in hindsight) 52:59.

The actual Bristol half-marathon was on a day of slightly odd weather - warm intervals broken up by one torrential downpour on the long out-and-back stretch along the Portway. I was suffering quite a bit by the end but managed to muster enough of a sprint finish to duck under the two-hour mark at 1:59:45.

I can't really remember what motivated me to then sign up for the Bath half-marathon in 2005 - presumably the desire to prove to myself that I could do a faster time than the first one. The main thing I remember was that the preparatory training regime was a lot tougher, since the training period was in the winter rather than the summer as it had been for Bristol (the actual races being in spring and autumn respectively) and entailed a lot of running in the dark. Anyway, I shaved just over a minute off my Bristol time at 1:58:40 and promptly retired from long-distance running.

That was basically it, 5K parkruns aside, until 2018 when Hazel suggested doing a challenge and came up with the Newport 10K. So we did that, and then discovered that a couple of friends had signed up for the Cardiff 10K, so we did that one as well. I ran a perfectly decent 55:08 for Newport and a slightly less impressive 58:04 at Cardiff, which I recall being very congested at the start and a much hotter day.

Finally, a few notes on parkrun courses I have run at, for the benefit of anyone thinking of having a go. Numbers in brackets are the number of times I've run there (as of today):

• Newport (18): At Tredegar House, mostly off-road, a couple of possible course layouts depending on season, weather and other things going on in the grounds, but all incorporating the section through the woods round the back of the artificial lake which can be quite muddy.
• Riverfront (17): Fast, flat, out-and-back course along the Usk in the town centre. Downstream and therefore slightly downhill on the way out, upstream and therefore slightly uphill on the way back but still a good one for a PB. As with any out-and-back course you have to be wary of runners (especially the super-speedy guys at the front) coming back the other way.
• Rogiet (7): at Rogiet Countryside Park, 3 laps, mostly flat but for one up-and-down hump at the far end of the course. Occasionally frequented by quiz maestro and possible canal-based murderer CJ de Mooi.
• Cwmbran (2): Occasional re-routings but usually starts by the boating lake and incorporates at least one lap of it. Fast and flat in the dry, off-road sections sometimes slippery and treacherous at other times. Ends by an ice-cream shop, though, which is nice.
• Wycombe Rye (1): Covered elsewhere but mostly flat, varied surfaces including grass at start and finish, bizarre little mini-section in the middle where you have to run up a series of steps in a wooded area and down again the other side.
• Severn Bridge (1): Out-and-back across the old Severn Bridge. As with most long-span bridges it's less flat than you might imagine; the turn-around point is just past the halfway point of the bridge so it's mostly uphill on the way out and downhill on the way back (i.e. the reverse of Riverfront).
• Meadowmill (1): Near Prestonpans, a few miles east of Edinburgh. Bagged on our Scottish holiday in the summer. Generally just a couple of laps of a field by a leisure centre with an odd little narrow out-and-back section to the back of Prestonpans railway station. 
• Tremorfa (1): Over on the east side of Cardiff, next to a giant Tesco which provides handy parking. Flat, fast, three-lap figure-of-eight course which I'd have been hoping for a decent time at had I not been struggling with a miserable cold. But it was the only available weekend so the challenge must take precedence. 
• Belvoir Castle (1): Off-road, out-and-back course near the entrance to the castle. Hilly. Downhill sections delightful (though you need to watch your footing), uphill ones, to quote myself, a bit of a bitch. 
• Llanfoist Crossing (1): New one (started in November) just round the corner from where my parents live. Mostly on an old railway line but nonetheless noticeably uphill on the way out and downhill on the way back, and with a little detour into a grassy park around the halfway point which can be slippery and involves a steepish hill to get back onto the main route. 

running joke

I'm not big on New Year's resolutions, but one that I did make at the start of 2024 (pretty much the only serious one I've ever made, actually, thinking about it) was to get out to the parkrun a bit more often, and since "a bit more often" is unacceptably woolly and just invites weaselling out or retrospective redefinition of the challenge to accommodate laziness, I made it a bit more specific: at least one parkrun every calendar month during 2024. So that means every month of the year has to include a parkrun, no skipping March and doing two in April, for instance; that doesn't count. 

I am a tedious evangelist for parkrun as a thing - all you have to do is register, save your membership barcode in some form (this used to mean some physical format but as of recently includes just having it saved on your phone), turn up, and run five kilometres (a smidge over three miles). That's it; all the timing and collating of results is done for you, including collection and analysis of your own personal stats. It's great, and for the reluctant runner (something I would definitely class myself as) provides just enough structure and accountability to encourage participation while not making the bar to entry too high. Running with a large group of other people of extremely mixed abilities has advantages as well; some find the whole community spirit and post-run chat and coffee thing delightful, while some (like me) don't really go for that but find it helpful and motivating to run in a group including lots of other people who are not conspicuously thinner and fitter than them but who are nonetheless not succumbing to the temptation to walk for a bit or just jack the whole thing in and slope off for a pint and a fag.

My brief parkrun history is as follows: I became aware of it back in the early noughties when some friends from Newbury started going regularly to the Greenham Common one and (as people tend to do) evangelising their ass off about it to all and sundry. No disrespect intended to those people, but I looked at them and thought, well, I could probably do that. This was around the time that parkrun (which started in late 2004 in Bushy Park in west London but only added a handful of events in its early years) really started to take off, and my first one was at Tredegar House (which bagged the Newport parkrun name as it was the first in the area in 2011) in March 2013, at which I ran a perfectly respectable 28:58 (that's me approaching the finish line on the right). I did another in May of that year and then took a brief sabbatical for around five and a half years before doing my next one at Riverfront in central Newport (which had started up in 2017) in September 2018. 

That pattern of occasional dabblings continued until early 2020 when Nia, who'd been a reasonably regular participant at the junior parkrun (two kilometres) decided that she'd like to upgrade to the adult version. We did a couple, the second of which in March 2020 turned out to be the last one before the COVID lockdown regulations prevented large groups of people getting together to breathe heavily and sweat over each other for around eighteen months. We participated in the first one back at Riverfront in August 2021 (and got our picture in the paper!) by which time it was clearly evident to me that I was on borrowed time in terms of finishing in front of Nia, or even keeping up with her for any length of time. 

Even after that participation was a bit patchy, though - having done three in the remainder of 2021 and an excellent nine in the first seven months of 2022 I then did none in the rest of 2022 and not a single one in 2023, for reasons I have no recollection of and therefore must just have been apathy. And so by the end of that year I obviously felt that some structure needed to be imposed.

Anyway, long story short, having done a total of eighteen parkruns up to the start of 2024 I fulfilled the terms of the challenge by doing fourteen in 2024 - double-up months were the nice friendly summer months of June and August, the second one in August being my first proper bit of parkrun tourism as we went to Wycombe Rye and had a minor celebrity encounter as described here. In renewing the challenge for 2025 I added a couple of optional stretch objectives: do more parkruns in total than in 2024, and have a crack at getting to fifty in total by the end of the year. That second one would entail doing eighteen during the year, something I'm here to tell you I achieved by running the new Llanfoist Crossing parkrun in early December. I'm slightly reluctant to make a big thing of it, although it's significant to me, as I personally know people whose tally stands at well over a hundred and the guy I spent most of the December parkrun behind (though I'd like it noted that I had him in the sprint finish) was wearing a 250 T-shirt, and I have seen a few 500s at other parkruns. 

I fully intend to renew the basic one-per-month resolution for 2026, though I'm not sure exceeding eighteen for the year is realistic. 

A few random observations to finish:

• My personal best progression is a bit of an odd one: while some people spend years nibbling off a few seconds here and there I set a target of 26:11 at my first ever Riverfront parkrun in 2018 and didn't improve on it until May 2025 when I ran 25:44. Not wanting to have that stand for another seven years I subsequently lowered it again to its current mark of 25:29 (at Riverfront again) in August.
• The watershed of Nia's PB being faster than mine was crossed in September 2024 when she ran 26:05 at Riverfront and she has remained ahead since (and I'm sure will permanently). Her current PB stands at just over a minute faster than mine at 24:36.
• You'll notice that Riverfront seems to be a PB-friendly course, and so it is. This is highly dependent on gradient and terrain, and Riverfront is pretty flat and on tarmac all the way. The one at Tredegar House, by contrast, is mostly flat but there are roots and rocks and mud to cope with so it's never as fast. The hilliest one I have done is at Belvoir Castle up in Leicestershire. 

the last book I read

The Beginning Of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald.

Frank Reid has a lot on his plate right now. Firstly there's Reid's, the family printing firm founded in Moscow by his father that he now runs, with the associated admin headaches - managing the staff with all their personal foibles, managing the occasional state suspicion of a foreign-run printing operation with its inbuilt potential to print Unsuitable Material, the associated need to occasionally grease the wheels of officialdom with some judicious bribery - but Frank has lived in Moscow most of his life and views this as mundane day-to-day business, although the current febrile political situation in Europe (it's 1913) makes everything a bit more difficult. Of more specific and immediate concern is the letter he's just received from his wife Nellie telling him that she has left him, taking their three children with her. No hard feelings, look after yourself, yours etc., Nellie.

There's no immediate indication where Nellie has headed off to, although everyone's assumption is that she's caught a train heading westwards to head back to Europe and perhaps ultimately her family's home in the south London suburb of Norbury. This theory is proven to be correct in an unexpected way when the three children turn up back at the Moscow railway station, having been put on a train back at Mozhaisk. No sign of Nellie, who apparently had continued in the opposite direction, presumably heading for Berlin.

So Frank is reunited with his kids, Dolly, Ben and little Annushka, which is great but does now pose another problem: who's going to look after them? After a couple of meetings with his eccentric business associate Kuriatin and the wife of the local Anglican chaplain fail to yield anyone who Frank feels is suitable, he is persuaded by his accountant Selwyn Crane to take on Lisa, a young woman of his acquaintance currently unhappily employed at a local department store.

So Frank can return to work at Reid's, but even here is immediately beset by other problems: Selwyn has persuaded him to do a small run of a book of his own poems and is taking a minute interest in the details, the chief print-setter is a man of almost mystical skill, somewhat temperamental and sensitive to upcoming developments in automated print-setting technology which will likely make his job obsolete, and lastly while checking up on the printing premises late at night Frank is confronted by a young student, Volodya, who attempts to shoot him (and misses) and then describes some vague scheme to get Reid's to facilitate the printing of some political leaflets. Frank lets him go and uses some of his skill and influence to persuade the police not to investigate.

Further complication is provided by the arrival of Charlie, Nellie's brother, who Frank had accepted an offer of a visit from on the assumption that he would have some information regarding Nellie, or maybe even have seen her. No such luck, however, and Charlie, an engaging enough doofus, just bumbles around having a nice holiday and entertaining the kids. 

The plot-thickening that happens comes from an unexpected direction and mainly involves Lisa - firstly Volodya reappears and confesses to Frank that the political leaflet thing was a red herring and he took a pot-shot at him because he is in love with Lisa, despite barely knowing her. This is vexing to Frank because he himself has decided that he is in love with Lisa. Finally Selwyn confesses to Frank that he, Selwyn, was in love with Nellie and that they had made tentative plans to run away together, plans which he, Selwyn, then scuppered by having an attack of conscience about betraying Frank. Nellie has apparently been staying at a Tolstoyan commune in England, at Selwyn's suggestion, but has found it not to her taste and left for an unknown destination.

Lisa, as it happens, is currently away at the Reids' ramshackle dacha with the children having a brief holiday, though one which includes a slightly bizarre late-night encounter in the forest between Lisa, Dolly and some mysterious wordless people who seem to emerge from the trees. Whatever that was all about, the eventual outcome is another call to Frank requesting that he collect his children from the railway station, Lisa having seemingly taken the opportunity to flee the country. 

A lot for Frank to take in here, to be fair, and just to cap it off, while the house shutters are being opened for the springtime thaw, Nellie returns.

The first thing to say here is that there's a lot of slyly-observed interpersonal stuff that I've skipped over in the synopsis above, which seems remarkable in a book of only 188 pages. This is the trick that Penelope Fitzgerald regularly pulls, though; you'll recall I said something very similar about The Gate Of Angels which was even shorter. Frank Reid is a level-headed and unflappable sort of chap who provides a contrast with the more eccentric characters who revolve around him, particularly the two main female protagonists, Nellie and Lisa, both of whose motivation are somewhat opaque. Lisa in particular is a bit of a mystery; she exerts a strange hold over Selwyn, Volodya and Frank and seems to be in control of the weird encounter in the forest with Dolly. Is she some sort of revolutionary agitator? Probably, but who knows? And what are we to make of Nellie's return? A change of heart, or a pragmatic realisation that this is her best option after running away (with or without Selwyn) didn't work out? It seems likely that with the Reids' reputation tarnished by the Lisa situation and with both war and revolution in the offing that the Reids' best option is going to be to sell the printing business and move back to England, which is probably what Nellie really wants anyway.

I think this is the fourth Penelope Fitzgerald book I've read, and they really are unlike just about anything else: short, but rich and dense and slightly mysterious. They're all good but this one and The Gate Of Angels are probably the best two. The Russian setting features in a few other books on this list, most obviously Winter Garden by Fitzgerald's rough contemporary (and writer of superficially similar novels) Beryl Bainbridge, but also more tangentially in Pattern Recognition and Love Is Blind and quite possibly a few others. The eve-of-World-War-I setting is also familiar from Waiting For Sunrise and both of the Isabel Colegate books on this list, Statues In A Garden and The Shooting Party. 

The Beginning Of Spring was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1988, just as The Gate Of Angels was two years later; she was nominated four times in total and won with Offshore in 1979. Peter Carey won in 1988 with Oscar and Lucinda, which I have read but, as I've said elsewhere, found a bit of a slog. Utz and Nice Work are the other two I've read from that year. 

chapter and curse

Bored with the lack of challenge involved in picking off eighty- and ninety-something authors as it has been recently, The Curse Of Electric Halibut has decided to pick off someone from the slightly lower age bracket, just to keep everyone on their toes, those who haven't just turned up their toes, anyway. And it is Daniel Woodrell, most famous for his 2006 novel Winter's Bone and its 2010 film adaptation. That's the only thing of his I've ever read, back in early 2016, but that was enough for the beady eye of death to swing slowly in his direction. Woodrell's age (72) and the curse length of a whisker under ten years are respectively about ten years below and a couple of years above the current averages.

 

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
José Saramago	9th May 2009	18th June 2010	87	1y 40d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	1y 291d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	6y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
David Cook	24th February 2009	16th September 2015	74	6y 205d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
William McIlvanney	7th September 2010	5th December 2015	79	5y 90d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d
John Berger	10th November 2009	2nd January 2017	90	7y 55d
Nicholas Mosley	24th September 2011	28th February 2017	93	5y 159d
Helen Dunmore	10th March 2008	5th June 2017	64	9y 89d
JP Donleavy	21st May 2015	11th September 2017	91	2y 114d
Ursula Le Guin	6th December 2015	22nd January 2018	88	2y 49d
Anita Shreve	2nd September 2006	29th March 2018	71	11y 211d
Philip Roth	23rd December 2017	22nd May 2018	85	0y 150d
Justin Cartwright	7th September 2008	3rd December 2018	75	10y 89d
Toni Morrison	18th July 2010	5th August 2019	88	9y 20d
Charles Portis	3rd April 2018	17th February 2020	86	1y 320d
Alison Lurie	24th March 2007	3rd December 2020	94	13y 254d
John le Carré	21st February 2008	12th December 2020	89	12y 295d
Joan Didion	14th December 2010	23rd December 2021	87	11y 12d
Hilary Mantel	22nd October 2010	22nd September 2022	70	11y 338d
Greg Bear	4th October 2021	19th November 2022	71	1y 48d
Russell Banks	4th December 2018	7th January 2023	82	4y 35d
Isabel Colegate	24th October 2009	12th March 2023	91	13y 140d
Cormac McCarthy	22nd September 2009	13th June 2023	89	13y 265d
Milan Kundera	27th March 2008	11th July 2023	94	15y 105d
Christopher Priest	6th January 2015	4th February 2024	80	9y 26d
Paul Auster	22nd April 2012	30th April 2024	77	12y 8d
Kinky Friedman	19th December 2007	27th June 2024	79	16y 191d
David Lodge	4th March 2008	1st January 2025	89	16y 301d
Jennifer Johnston	23rd July 2012	25th February 2025	95	12y 215d
Mario Vargas Llosa	12th April 2007	13th April 2025	89	18y 1d
Frederick Forsyth	8th November 2021	9th June 2025	86	3y 214d
Daniel Woodrell	12th January 2016	28th November 2025	72	9y 320d

the last book I read

Day by A.L. Kennedy.

Alfie Day has had a better war than some; still alive, for one thing, and moreover with all of his limbs and most of his mental faculties intact, a bit of PTSD aside. This is doubly lucky as his job as the tail gunner on a Lancaster bomber would qualify as one of the more thrillingly high-risk jobs, even within the context of being in the RAF during World War II. 

The book's nominal "now" is a handful of years after the end of the war, with Alfie having decided to take up an offer of being an extra in a film set during the war, for which filming is taking place in some unspecified eastern European country. A somewhat quixotic decision, on the face of it, what with it bringing back memories of his wartime experiences both as part of his bomber crew but also as a prisoner of war after his last bombing mission resulted in the deaths of most of his crew and his having to bail out over enemy territory. Maybe the idea was that re-confronting some of this stuff would bring some sort of closure and enable him to come to terms with things; more importantly of course it provides a narrative backdrop to some flashback action wherein we are dropped back into a set of selected scenes from the war.

These sections are mainly concerned with the series of bombing raids Alfie's crew carries out, with the imminence of potential fiery death at all times, and the associated brittle banter and camaraderie. It's not all getting raked by tracer fire, performing evasive manoeuvres and firebombing Dresden, though, my goodness no. There are occasional bouts of leave wherein the crew get to do some rest and relaxation, get to know each other, and do the obligatory drinking and roistering. Alfie also meets a young lady called Joyce while sheltering from an air-raid and a tentative romance develops, tempered by Joyce's admission that she has a husband, albeit one whom she doesn't really like very much and who is away on military duty from which there's no guarantee he'll ever return. 

The present-day setting isn't purely a narrative device to hang some flashbacks off, though; the motley crew of actors and ex-servicemen that constitutes the film's cast holds some interest, in particular Vasyl, a slightly shady character who may be Ukrainian or may equally possibly be Latvian. Alfie's initial assumption that he was a heroic resistance fighter in one or other of those countries is somewhat undercut by Vasyl's later admission that he was basically a Big Old Nazi and responsible for some eye-watering atrocities during the war that he will now face no consequences for, or not via the standard legal route anyway. Alfie and his mates may have an eye to some less formal vigilante-style justice once filming duties are out of the way, though.

Alfie is briefly tempted by making the most of the opportunities that exist for an exciting life of crime in the lax post-war regime in mainland Europe, but eventually returns to England, perhaps partly persuaded by the idea of rekindling his relationship with Joyce. We are invited to infer that things have simmered down to the occasional exchange of letters after Joyce's husband rather inconveniently returned alive and well from the war, but the latest letters suggest that she may be open to some sort of, hem hem, arrangement.

World War II is a prime subject for fiction, as any novel set here comes pre-loaded with interest, danger, the great sweep of history, and all that stuff, and there are quite a few books on this list that use it as a backdrop, most recently Light Perpetual, Fragrant Harbour and Charlotte Gray (the review of The Reader has a fuller list). Just to illustrate the wide palette of choices available to you as an author, the first two there treat the war as just a brief interlude in the wider timeline of the story, while Charlotte Gray embeds pretty much the entire story in the context of the war. There are also varying degrees of success, and you need to be careful not to draw accusations of just throwing some wartime stuff in there to weigh the story down with a bit of unearned gravitas, something you'll recall I thought Light Perpetual was guilty of.

I don't think that criticism can be made of Day, but it seemed to be, although well-written and involving, slightly unsatisfactory for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on. The framing device of the film shoot is odd, and Alfie's reasons for being there are never explained - as a mildly-traumatised ex-serviceman it seems like the last thing you'd want to do and it invites the suspicion that he did it just because it provided a convenient narrative scaffolding to hang the other stuff off. The most interesting thing that Alfie actually does (or we are strongly invited to infer that he does, anyway) during the various flashbacks, which is to murder his abusive father by pushing him in a canal, is mentioned briefly and then never referred to again. Ursula K Le Guin offers some criticisms here, most of which I find myself in agreement with.

Maybe the answer is to be found by looking at Kennedy's other work - the two novels featured here, So I am Glad and Looking For The Possible Dance, are quirky character-driven things with a fairly narrow domestic setting. Some of the charm of that seems to have been lost here in the attempt to embed Alfie's story within the wider sweep of history, an attempt perhaps made because that's the sort of thing that wins literary awards, and sure enough Day won the Costa Novel Award (formerly the Whitbread Award and defunct since 2022) in 2007. I think Days Without End is the most recent other Costa winner on this list; that review also contains a list of other winners featured on this blog.

criclebrity lookeylikey of the day

Here's a timely one with the Ashes series in Australia about to kick off (tonight, in fact) and all England supporters filled with a mixture of trepidation (the last three Australian Ashes series have finished 5-0, 4-0, 4-0 in Australia's favour) and that most crippling and corrosive of all emotions, hope. I suppose a good start would be the series not being effectively over after the very first ball as it was last time. 

Anyway, here's England's unexpected nemesis from last time Scott Boland and actor Wes Bentley, one of the breakout stars of the multi-Oscar-winning American Beauty, a film which seems to have had a sharp (and probably partly Spacey-related) drop-off in critical regard in the last couple of decades but which I recall seeing a couple of times and quite enjoying, while noting that it seemed to think itself slightly cleverer and deeper than it probably actually was. One odd thing about it, though, is that all three of the young actors who were shot to stardom after playing major roles - Bentley, Thora Birch and Mena Suvari - have, while continuing to work in films, receded into relative obscurity since and not become the major stars that everyone predicted they would be. Bentley seems to have navigated the standard actorly route of sudden colossal stardom -> drug addiction, extreme mental derangement -> sobriety, return to regular film work prototyped by Robert Downey jr. among others. The only thing I'm aware of having seen him in since American Beauty is the remake of Pete's Dragon which also starred Robert Redford.

I'm not going to do a separate post for it, but we haven't done an "incidental music spot of the day" for a while so I will just draw your attention to the trailer linked above making use of Baba O'Riley by The Who, a song which has featured here before, back in 2007. 

the last book I read

The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.

Brendan Doyle is just quietly minding his own business being a professor of English literature when a man comes to him with a modest proposal; join me on an assignment - a well-paid assignment, moreover - wherein your interest and expertise in the works of 19th-century poets will be of immense practical value. 

Well, that all sounds great, but what could the nature of this assignment possibly be that would require the services of an expert in early-19th-century English poetry? Ah, well, I'm glad you asked: I, elderly and eccentric millionaire J. Cochran Darrow, have somehow discovered a series of portals that permit travel between different locations in time and space. The nature of this wavily-defined thing is such that you don't have total control over the when and where, and it just happens that I've found a portal that will shortly (literally in a few hours from now) be accessible from our current location in 1983 Los Angeles and which links for a period of time with 1810 London and will permit a small group of customers, paying lavishly for the privilege, to travel there/then, hear an in-person lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with extra context and biographical detail supplied by you, and then return home again. Pretty cool, huh?

A bit of exposition is offered by Darrow in the course of explaining the assignment to Doyle, and the reader also gets the benefit of a brief prologue set in 1802 wherein a couple of mysterious wielders of sorcery attempt to summon up the ancient Egyptian God Anubis, as you do, and succeed only in inflicting harm upon themselves and opening up a series of rents, "gates" if you will, in space-time radiating out in both directions from 1802 and allowing those possessed of the relevant arcane knowledge to travel between them.

So anyway, Darrow, Doyle, and various millionaire enthusiasts get dolled up in suitable period garb and travel back to 1810 to hear Coleridge speak; all goes pretty smoothly for everyone except Doyle, who is coshed senseless and abducted by mysterious persons who turn out to be, among others, Doctor Romany, one of the magicians associated with the 1802 shenanigans who is keen to understand and contain what's been unleashed. Doyle, having missed the window of opportunity to return to 1983, escapes and flees back into London.

But how to survive in early-19th-century London? Doyle finds his way into a loose guild of beggars and street thieves and is taken under the wing of the slightly Artful Dodger-esque Jacky. Meanwhile he is hatching a plan to make contact with another poet of the time, William Ashbless, whose more obscure oeuvre he has made a special study of, and whose documented movements he is familiar with to the extent of knowing that he'll be in a particular tavern in a day or two's time. 

Lots of plot strands here that we'll just summarise to save time: the mysterious Dog-Face Joe, seemingly able to swap bodies with unsuspecting individuals (who inherit the ruined shell of whatever body he was previously in, usually for a short period ended by its death) and the odd outbreak of seemingly insane short-lived hairy individuals attacking people around London all turn out to be aspects of the same thing, the continued existence of the other 1802 magician, Amenophis Fikee, after the events of that night evicted him from his original body. The first magician, Doctor Romany (the one who briefly abducted Doyle in 1810), is running a pickpocketing and murdering guild of his own, headquartered in some subterranean caverns connected to the sewer system and the Thames, and continuing his attempt to conjure up various Egyptian gods. Finally Darrow, Doyle's mysterious benefactor from 1983, has returned to 1810 and is using his knowledge of stock market performance in the intervening 173 years to make a fortune and negotiating with Dog-Face Joe aka Fikee to make use of his body-swapping knowledge to achieve eternal youth.

Keeping up? Excellent. So Doyle gets to experience first-hand knowledge of some of this when he is forcibly body-swapped in the tavern he'd gone to to meet Ashbless (who didn't show) and wakes up in a different body which has just taken a large dose of strychnine. Luckily Doyle has enough knowledge to be able to vomit up the poison and after a day or two is as right as rain and, moreover, inhabiting a body that's considerably younger and physically more imposing than his old one. Doyle soon realises that in some weird paradoxical time-travel accidentally-becoming-your-own-grandfather way he is actually William Ashbless. He's not sure what the magicians are up to but resolves to thwart them, with some help from some locals who are in the know. This involves a bewildering series of trips including a time-hop to 1684 and a brief trip by sea to Cairo to meet (and subsequently kill) the chief magician. Upon returning to London, Doyle/Ashbless, Jacky and, slightly bizarrely, a laudanum-crazed Samuel Taylor Coleridge are abducted into the subterranean caverns and, after some odd encounters with some of the mysterious creatures who also live down there (remnants of some botched magical experiments) and a couple of telling interventions from the Egyptian gods who the magicians have been bothering (notably the snake-god Apep), Jacky and Doyle/Ashbless are vomited out into the Thames while the magicians and their various minions are consumed by Apep and Ra and various other entities not best pleased at being bothered from their centuries-long slumber.

Doyle is now in the odd philosophical position of being free to live out the rest of his life as Ashbless while knowing, from his 20th-century studies, most of the biographical details up to and including the date and manner of his death (thankfully a few decades off yet). He also knows the name of his future wife and WAIT A MINUTE Jacky reveals to him that she's been a woman disguised as a man all along and her real name is, well, I expect you can join the dots here. Ashbless and the future Mrs. Ashbless link arms and head off to enjoy their future together, with only the small inconvenience of Ashbless already knowing pretty much all of it.

That was quite a long synopsis and you can see I had to skate over some of it - and omit some of it altogether, including the rationale for Jacky actually being an upper-class young woman disguised as a street urchin - lest this become the longest blog post ever. The TL;DR version would be: there's a lot going on here, possibly a bit too much to allow every plot contrivance to be tied up satisfactorily at the end. The nature of how the gates work is hand-waved away and while they're obviously important to the plot (important enough to give the book its title, after all) they're arguably just a contrivance to insert Doyle in 1810 where the rest of the action takes place. 

The important thing is not to worry about any of that too much and just be swept along by the action, and as long as you do that then this is generally a hoot. The committee that awards the annual Philip K Dick Award evidently thought so too, as The Anubis Gates was the winner in 1984. Powers won it again in 1986; his two wins sandwich the only other recipient I've read, William Gibson's Neuromancer. Powers is also known for his 1987 novel On Stranger Tides which was loosely adapted into the fourth Pirates Of The Caribbean film. 

Many echoes of other fictional works here, as you can imagine - here's a few:

• there is an odd parallel with the only other novel in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series to appear on this list, Time And Again, in that both start with our protagonist being approached by someone he doesn't know and offered a large sum of money to make use of some ill-defined time-travel device to travel to the 19th century and carry out an assignment.
• a couple of weird parallels with the work of Douglas Adams: firstly the use of Coleridge as a plot device, with the suggestion that some of his experiences may have bled through (facilitated by his heroic opium intake) into his later poetry, is similar to what happens in The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul, the second Dirk Gently novel [postscript: it was actually the first one, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. In my defence it's a long time since I read either of them]. Secondly both The Anubis Gates and the later novels in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy series feature a plot device of the main character having foreknowledge relating to his own death. In Ashbless' case it's the date and circumstances, in Arthur Dent's case it's knowing that he can't die yet because he hasn't visited the nightclub on Stavromula Beta where he carries out one of his multiple accidental murders of the creature Agrajag.
• the idea of a ka as a sort of disembodied vital essence is familiar from the works of Dennis Wheatley, in particular his 1956 novel The Ka Of Gifford Hillary (which I have never read). In the particular context of The Anubis Gates its meaning is extended to a sort of animated copy of a person conjured from the usual blood/hair combo and therefore a bit more like a golem. It was also used (with some further twisting of its original meaning) by Stephen King in the Dark Tower series.
• the body-swapping thing, in particular - as I put it elsewhere - the "unceremonious yeeting" of the body's previous occupant, is a device used in Ancillary Justice and more briefly in Transition.

Tim Powers provides the latest in a shortish series of different authors on this list who share a surname. Here are the ones I've spotted on a brief trawl of the archives, in no particular order:

• Tim Powers and Richard Powers
• Iain (M) Banks and Russell Banks
• Jim Harrison and M John Harrison
• Graham Swift and Jonathan Swift
• Ali Smith, Alexander McCall Smith and Michael Marshall Smith - depending of course how your surname-classification rules work
• F Scott Fitzgerald and Penelope Fitzgerald - as above

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Seen on Facebook this week, this short video inviting "wrong answers only" to the question of who the mystery golfer is. There's limited fun in this, as his identity is revealed in the caption at the bottom, but I do have a suggestion. So here's Swedish golfer Jesper Parnevik (for it is he, sporting a moustache and bouffant hairdo combo that he didn't have during his prime playing days of the late 1990s and early 2000s) and American novelist Kurt Vonnegut.

I've no idea of the date of the footage; I don't want to assume it's recent just because the algorithm threw it into my timeline in the last couple of days. All I can tell you is that Parnevik didn't have the 'tache/'fro combo when he bagged his only PGA Champions Tour victory in 2016, so it's probably more recent than that. He doesn't play much these days.

Anyway, both of these guys have featured on this blog before: Vonnegut twice as a book featuree (Cat's Cradle and The Sirens Of Titan) and prior to both of those on the occasion of his death in April 2007, and Parnevik in the course of a throwaway aside at the end of this post about Ayers Rock/Uluru in late 2019. Parnevik also continues the strong tradition of golfers featuring in this category, as evidenced most recently just a couple of months ago. 

sudeley, life has new meaning to me

Part two of the mappage catchuppage features a couple of lower-level walks, though not without summit-conquering of a sort, as you may have already seen if you looked at the photo gallery I linked to in the last post. 

Anyway, back in June a group of us decided to get together for a weekend away, as we didn't get to see each other very often for the usual middle-aged reasons: gradual geographical dispersion, kids to be fed and entertained, increasing physical decrepitude, male pattern baldness, piles, gout, etc. We hired an AirBnB in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire with the intention of doing some walking in the Cotswolds and a bit of eating and drinking and general hanging out, shooting the shit and all that. It fell to Steffen and myself to do most of the route-organising and I think we did a pretty decent job, coming up with a long walk on day 1 when we had all day and a slightly shorter one for day 2 when everyone wanted to be on the road back by mid-afternoon. 

Day 1 comprised a 20-kilometre clockwise circular walk starting and finishing at the house and encompassing the highest parts of the entire Costwold group of hills as well as a couple of other points of interest including the Bela's Knap long barrow. The high plateau of Cleeve Hill and Cleeve Common is a pleasant place to be, especially in the warm sunny weather we were fortunate enough to have. Another pleasant place to be is the Rising Sun in Cleeve Hill village where we stopped for a couple of refreshing pints (Otter ales, if I remember rightly) and some light lunch. 

The actual high point of the day, and indeed of the Costwolds as a whole, is the summit of Cleeve Hill at a fairly modest 330 metres (1080 feet). The actual summit is a fairly anonymous trig point a couple of hundred yards from a car park and a couple of radio masts (you can see it marked with a "330" at the bottom of the map below); the grander viewpoint with a single tree, some memorial plaques and benches, another trig point and a toposcope a kilometre or so to the north-west is more impressive, but a few metres lower. Crucially this is also the county high point of Gloucestershire, which enables me to tick that off on my list. Going purely by the county list linked in that magazine article, and not getting involved in an argument about the sense of listing long-defunct counties like Huntingdonshire and Merionethshire, my list currently comprises the following:

England

• Berkshire
• Cornwall
• Cumberland
• Derbyshire
• Devon
• Dorset
• Gloucestershire
• Herefordshire
• Lancashire
• Somerset
• Westmorland

Wales

• Brecknockshire
• Caernarfonshire
• Cardiganshire
• Carmarthenshire
• Monmouthshire
• Pembrokeshire

Scotland

• Aberdeenshire
• Banffshire
• Inverness-shire
• Stirlingshire

In need of sustenance after the walk we had an evening in Winchcombe which included visits to the White Hart and Plaisterer's Arms and a curry afterwards. All very nice, as is the food in the White Hart where those of us who'd come down on the Friday night to wring maximum possible value out of the weekend had gone for dinner.

We had to check out of the house on Sunday morning, so we decided to start day 2's walk a mile or so down the road at Sudeley Castle, which fortunately has a nice big (and free) car park which you don't feel too guilty about making use of without actually visiting the buildings ("castle" is a bit of a stretch; it's a large country house). Sudeley is mainly famous for being the home of Catherine Parr, widow of Henry VIII; she moved there upon remarrying after Henry's death and is buried in the grounds. I must admit I was ignorant of what happened to her after Henry's death, in particular that she'd subsequently married Thomas Seymour, brother of Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour, and that for all the "divorced, beheaded, survived" stuff she only outlived Henry by about a year and a half, dying of complications from childbirth in September 1548 at the age of thirty-six.

I would describe this as a pleasant country ramble, memorable for being spent in excellent company and very pleasant weather rather than for anything exceptional about the details. The eleven or so kilometres (clockwise again; gently uphill for the first half, gently downhill for the second) got us back to the car park just after lunchtime and we eased our collective conscience about the car park situation by buying an ice cream from the cafe before heading off home. A few photos from the weekend can be found here.

the path of least resistance

Following on from the Blorenge and Scottish walks described in earlier posts, a few more maps I spotted in my collection from recent outings and which I thought might warrant a mention here. Firstly, Pen y Fan. Now you'll probably be aware that I've featured ascents of this particular mountain a few times before on this blog; I won't attempt to collate all of them but you might start here, here, here and here. But it is, let's not forget, the highest mountain in Southern Britain, a slightly woolly claim but one which essentially means that if you draw a horizontal line on a map of Britain a few feet south of the summit of Cadair Idris, as I've done below, the highest point in the region south of that line is indeed the summit of Pen y Fan. Yes, granted, you've defined your terms in such a way as to get the answer you want, but it's not an insignificant thing. 

Anyway, sometimes you want to find new and interesting ways to get up and down (and you almost always can), but sometimes you just want to smash up, bag it, smash down again, bish bosh, sorted. Other considerations are who else is coming along on the walk and how much gratuitous extra distance and effort they'll be prepared to tolerate without getting all whiny and annoying, and indeed who is in charge of route planning. I get a bit twitchy if this isn't me, but sometimes it isn't and you have to take an attitude of Zen-like acceptance in the face of whatever ill-thought-out bullshit other people come up with.

Examples, you say? Gladly. Here is the walk we did for my birthday back in February, a time of year when I get a free one-off opportunity to annoy everybody by making them do an activity of my choosing, which of course is going to be some tedious outdoorsy shit. So I'd proposed a trip up Pen Y Fan, which Nia had done a couple of times before but neither Alys nor Huwie had. I can't remember whether we'd done any advance planning for the Scotland trip at this stage but I might have had the thought of using it as a warm-up for the more strenuous mountain walking that would be involved there. My sister-in-law and brother-in-law and their two boys wanted to come as well, so I thought I'd better play it safe and just do one of the quick routes. So we parked up in the recently-expanded Pont ar Daf car park and did a circular route up via the path from Storey Arms and back down the main path which terminates at the car park, a round trip of a little over eight kilometres, or five miles if you prefer, in a clockwise direction on the map below.

What's very obviously apparent both from looking at the contours and the altitude chart a couple of kilometres in, and indeed from listening to the chorus of complaining from my fellow walkers, is that the forced loss and regain of around sixty metres in height in order to traverse the mini-valley containing the Blaen Taf-fawr stream is a bit of a motivation-killer early doors, just as it's a bit of an unwelcome sting in the tail at the end of a fifteen-mile bi-directional traverse of the main Beacons ridge.

Simple, you'll be saying, just use that prominently-marked green path that swings up to the north and, at the cost of maybe an extra half a kilometre across the ground, stays on the contours the whole way. And my answer to that is I'd love to, but it's not really discernible, still less signposted, any more. If you look at Google Maps' satellite view, really zoom in, and squint a bit you can just about convince yourself that there might be a scratch in the ground resembling a path, and if you drop the StreetView man right at the start of the path up from Storey Arms you might just about make out a grassy track ascending through a break in the heather on the left, but I have walked past here a few times, and past where the path supposedly rejoins the main path at the Tommy Jones obelisk, without noticing anything obvious. Next time I'm up there in reasonable weather with no pressing need to keep anyone else fed or entertained I'm going to have a look for it though.

Similarly, while the OS map shows a few alternative paths either side of the main route up from Pont ar Daf, none of those are discernible any longer at ground level. This will be largely because of the considerable path maintenance and landscaping effort that's gone on alongside the car park improvements to reduce the amount of erosion along these heavily-used routes. That does create a feedback loop, though, in that people will then be constrained, or at least heavily encouraged, to only using those routes for ascent rather than fanning out over a number of different routes to the same end-point, and perhaps reducing wear on any individual one. 

A couple of schools of thought on this one; Cameron McNeish, author of a couple of excellent books on Scottish mountain walking that I own, is a fervent advocate of people being, as he puts it, goats rather than sheep and making their own ways up, on the grounds that this reduces wear and tear and prevents a single furrow being worn into the ground that then needs repair and reinforcement. I'm quite sympathetic to this viewpoint, though the counter-example I would offer is Waun Fach in the Black Mountains, recent-ish recipient of exactly the sort of hard landscaping and path constraining that McNeish decries, but which I don't think anyone could rationally say is a worse place to be on top of now than before. 

My second ascent of Pen y Fan this year was as part of the I Am Pen y Fan charity challenge organised by SightLife, the charity my wife works for, and at the start of which we were seen off by charity patron Ceri Dupree, who didn't join us for the walk as the fabulous sequined Welsh flag dress he was wearing would have been rather constricting, not to mention a bit chilly on a wet and windy day. You will see from the summit photo that Huwie resolutely rocked a green sequined tailcoat the whole way to the top as a tribute, though. 

Route-wise this was as vanilla as it gets, just straight up and back from the car park, with a small loop on the way up for those who deemed it desirable and/or necessary (i.e. pretty much just me and the kids) to bag Corn Du. The summit photo I've reproduced above also features in this ongoing Twitter thread and in the recently-updated mega-gallery of trig points and mountain summits. 

the last book I read

Trio by William Boyd.

Here's Elfrida Wing, blearily coming downstairs on a summer morning in 1968 for a nutritious breakfast of some orange juice with a good solid slug of vodka in it, just to set her up for another day of not getting round to writing a novel to follow up her previous one, published a good ten years earlier. The vodka is from one of various secret stashes hidden around the house, although there's currently no need for any subterfuge because husband Reggie is off directing a movie in Brighton. 

Here's Talbot Kydd, producer of Reggie's movie, which goes by the tremendously late-1960s title of Emily Bracegirdle's Extremely Useful Ladder To The Moon. Talbot is a sixtyish ex-army chap, married, couple of grown-up children, but starting to experience unexpected Feelings, you know, Down There, which suggest to him that the life of a regular vanilla heterosexual might not actually be his thing after all. 

And here's Anny Viklund, American actress and star of Reggie and Talbot's movie. A complicated girl with a complicated past involving a bit of a thing for older men into political activism, from her most recent boyfriend Jacques, a French philosopher, to her ex-husband Cornell, a proper domestic terrorist responsible for some actual bombings on American soil and currently a fugitive from justice. Anny is taking a break from all this complicated stuff by having some nice uncomplicated sex with her co-star, a nice uncomplicated bloke called Troy Blaze (not his real name), a pop star trying to break into acting. 

Elfrida hatches an idea to kick her writer's block into touch - no, don't be silly, not cutting down on the sauce, but instead using a real-life fellow writer's life as the framework for a novel. That way some of the plot takes care of itself, and best of all she has a ready-made candidate in mind: Virginia Woolf. Not only were some of Elfrida's early novels loosely compared by critics with Woolf's work, but there's an obvious hook to hang the new book's plot on: Woolf's suicide by drowning in 1941.

Work on the film, meanwhile, continues, with some script doctoring being done by another, younger novelist, Janet Headstone, with whom Reggie is also having an affair. Anny and Troy continue with their acting duties by day and blissful fucking by night until Anny has an unexpected encounter outside her hotel with her ex-husband Cornell, unexpectedly in England and in need of money for some murky scheme that will enable him to evade the hands of the CIA and FBI. Panicking, and keen to get rid of him, she agrees, hoping that handing over a wad of cash will be the end of things. Which, of course, it isn't, as only a few days later the British police and an FBI guy turn up asking awkward questions. Panicking some more, Anny gives them the slip and flees to France, where she can throw herself on the mercy of Jacques, only too keen to help as it offers him an opportunity to a) get back into her knickers in return and b) give the American and British imperialist pigdogs a bloody nose.

This is not great news for anyone involved with the film, though, as it's not finished yet and Anny still has some scenes left to shoot. Talbot hires a private investigator, Ken Kincade, to accompany him to France and try to find her. Kincade is a man of unconventional style and methods but remarkably effective at his job, and also, as an openly gay man (something only very recently possible in 1968), possessed of a sensitive enough gaydar to detect Talbot's inner turmoil and probe him (no, not in that way) about it a bit. Not neglecting the day job, though, he soon tracks down Anny who is hiding out in Jacques' brother's apartment.

Meanwhile Elfrida is experiencing a dwindling of the brief excitement that accompanied her hatching of the Virginia Woolf idea, and moreover is starting to experience some weird side-effects of her epic booze consumption, not just the usual ones of passing out and pissing oneself but also some weirder things like imagining things crawling under her skin. She has also - somewhat belatedly - come to the realisation that Reggie is sleeping with Janet Headstone and in a fit of depression decides to don a heavy overcoat, load the pockets up with rocks, and emulate Virginia Woolf's suicide in the River Ouse. After not even managing to pull this off successfully Elfrida decides that she has hit bottom and it's time to seek help, which turns out to be a nunnery thinly disguised as a rehab facility.

Meanwhile Anny, feeling the net closing in from both Talbot and the FBI, takes off again in Jacques' brother's car, intending to head for Spain but ending up in Cap Ferret, which if you do the right accent sounds like it ought to be in Yorkshire but is actually in south-western France. Surely she'll be safe from her pursuers here?

Talbot, having failed to persuade Anny to return to Brighton and fulfil her contractual obligations, cooks up an alternative ending to the film with Reggie and Janet (one that doesn't require any further contributions from Anny), sells up his stake in the film production company and decides on some radical re-invention of his life, starting with the burly scaffolder who did some work on his house, narrowly avoided dropping some heavy ironmongery on his head, and has definitely been giving him the eye. 

So by the end all three have undergone some major life re-alignments, more so in one case than the other two. I will restrict myself to a PARTIAL PLOT SPOILER ALERT here by merely saying that one of the principal trio of characters dies at the end, without saying which one it is; it might not be the one you expect. Or maybe it is?

This is the seventh William Boyd novel on this list and so we very much know what to expect by now. This one departs slightly from the pattern followed by the big biographical epics like Any Human Heart and Sweet Caress by having multiple viewpoints (three in fact; the title is a bit of a giveaway), but follows them in being smart, occasionally funny, having interesting and believable characters and straddling the line between what you might call "popular" and "literary" fiction, if you insisted on drawing a line where no such thing really exists. It's probably not as good as some of the others, partly because the multiple-viewpoints thing and the book's relative shortness (just over 300 pages) mean that it doesn't feel like we really get to spend enough time with any of the main characters. Boyd clearly had a lot of fun with the 1960s period-specific stuff and the recreation of the film industry setting, something he has direct experience of. As with any William Boyd book it's highly readable and entertaining; Brazzaville Beach and The Blue Afternoon remain the ones, though.